Soft Matter
Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications
7. Interfaces, surfaces and membranes
The additional material is organized according to book sections and it includes links to (review) papers mentioned in the book, videos of different phenomena we discuss (experiments and simulations), as well as links to online lectures that address certain topics in more details.
A number of lectures at the workshop The Physics of Elastic Films: from Biological Membranes to Extreme Mechanics held at the Kavli Institute in 2021 are relevant to the topics discussed in chapter 7.
7.2 Helfrich free energy for membranes
An introductory lecture by Katharina Brazda on the Helfrich model. From Geometic Analysis Seminar.
7.3 Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical shells
An elementary introduction to viruses.
From FuseSchool.
A short animation about various virus shapes.
From Esraa Ashraf.
7.4 Crumpling of membranes and sheets
Video of an aluminum sheet crumpled into a ball. From Unripe Content.
A short video by Jovana Andrejevic about the application of fragmentation theory to crumpling. From Nature Portfolio.
TED talk by Bas Overvelde “From crumpling to designer matter”. From TEDx.
Four lectures on Geometric frustration and the intrinsic approach in soft matter by Efi Efrati, given at the 2024 Amherst summer school on Soft Solids and Complex fluids. Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, Lecture 4.
A lecture by David Nelson on perforations and crumpling of free standing graphene.
From SUMTOPO18.
7.5 A soft matter realization of the 1d KPZ equation
Videos of the interfaces in liquid crystals studied in this section: (left) circular and (right) flat interface. From SanoLaboratory.
Problems
Problem 7.10: a lecture by David Nelson on liquid crystals on cones. From Isaac Newton Institute.
Coding Problems
Our aim is to make coding problems available for all chapters, including this one, by the end of 2025.